Citizenship, nationality and other identities.

• Author: Alonso, William
• Position: Transcending National Boundaries

The idea that citizenship in a nation-state should be a person's primary identity is a recent one on an historic scale. In many cases it is only a hopeful fiction, although sometimes it is a useful one.(1) For most people this form of identity competes with, or complements, several other forms of identity, such as race, tribe, language, ancestry, religion or ideology. A person's, or a group's, primary identity may well vary with circumstance and context, and no country's peoples are homogeneous. This is to state the obvious, of course, yet this human reality is often ignored. It is ignored not only in patriotic speeches on national holidays, but often, to our peril, in national and international policies, in the construction of international institutions and in the settling of international disputes. Despite this, nations (in the sense of the government of a territory and its people) remain vital blocks for international processes and institutions, however short they may fall from their idealized versions as nation-states.

It is not my purpose here to rehearse the many arguments about the shallowness of the premise that in an ideal world nation-states would be formed on the basis of the self-determination of homogeneous groups. Suffice it to say that, carried to its logical conclusion, this super-Wilsonian vision would cover the earth with a complete and non-overlapping mosaic of tens of thousands of nation-states, each a union of blood and soil - ein Reich, ein Volk. Even so, there still would be significant minorities within most of these mini-states, while other groups would be spread geographically across national boundaries. The questions of what defines a "people" (or a "nation," in this sense) and of what constitutes their proper territory are ultimately unanswerable as abstract propositions, and, as practical ones, they are invariably contentious.

There is a vast and sophisticated literature on the rise of the nation-state and on nationalism and its relation to alternative identities. In general, these works start off bravely, trying to define such terms as "nation" and "state" and associated ones such as "ethnicity," but they are usually forced to give up at some point and settle for a designative definition. This is particularly true of the scholarship that the cataclysmic changes in national and international structures that have occurred since 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the communist empire. Most of these works tried to explain the development of a world of nation-states, with special reference to the nations of Europe and the United States. Among the most distinguished texts in this genre, and simplifying greatly for the sake of brevity, one may cite Ernest Gellner's Nations and Nationalism, which takes a functional-structural approach; Eric J. Hobsbawm's Nations and Nationalism since 1780, which takes a Marxist approach; and Liah Greenfeld's Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, which stresses the role of language and ideas.(2) These are all works of great learning and subtle arguments, that deal with very complex historical processes and suggest their consequences for our times and for the future. Gellner, Hobsbawm and Greenfeld, while not unmindful of the inevitable remaining ambiguities and contradictions in their portraits of the modern age, tell us how we have come to live in a world of nation-states and that the future, whatever it may hold, is not going to be very different from the past.(3)

By contrast, two more recent books (which postdate the crumbling of the communist empire), Daniel P. Moynihan's Pandaemonium: Ethnicity in International Politics and William Pfaff's The Wrath of Nations: Civilization and the Furies of Nationalism, present a far more contingent picture of how we have arrived at our present situation, and suggest a much more fluid and uncertain future.(4) Moynihan stresses the persistence of ethnic identity as an active factor, sometimes virulent and sometimes benign. He confronts the liberal-functionalist-rationalist belief that ethnic identity should wither away along with other ascribed statuses, as well as Marxist theory, which hold ethnicity to be a form of false identity which would wither away with the growth of an international proletarian consciousness. Pfaff stresses how, after the First World War, the victorious allies carved arbitrary borders and designed institutional structures for nation-states in their own image, much as the former colonies of European empires in Africa and Asia were made into new nation-states after the Second World War. To Pfaff, whatever the vices and malignities of these past empires, they did not demand strict adherence to any particular orthodoxy but allowed corporatist diversity within their realm, although frequently encouraging ethnic and religious conflicts on the principle of "divide and conquer." To Moynihan, ethnicity is like a weed in the garden which will not die and will mutate and spring up again in newly-adapted forms to defeat the careful horticulture of nation-building.

What is striking is the difference in tone in the discourse during the Cold War and afterward. In the earlier period the primacy of nation-states seemed undeniable. Since then, the world has become a far more changeable and contingent place, one where a person's primary identity as a national of a country is itself more malleable.

Among the forces challenging citizenship as a primary identity are three which I shall call supranational, subnational and transnational. Having already noted the great difficulty of defining subject, I will not try here to define the exact meanings of these words, but it is my hope that the discussion below will illustrate them sufficiently by example. I will use "nation" and "country" to mean a territory and its (more or less) sovereign government. I will use "citizen" or "national" to mean a legal resident of a country and "nationalism" as a positive sentiment or ideology of a national for his country. To avoid repeating a tiresome listing of alternatives to nationalism as bases for identities, I will use "ethnic" and "ethnicity" in a very broad sense, to include whatever members of a population believe to be the basis of their own solidarity and their invidious distinctions from other groups (language, religion, supposed ancestry and past injustices, for example). I will use "nation-state" for a territory and its government, for which the notion is, whether true or not, that its population shares solidarity on a nationalist or ethnic basis.

Supranationality

The United Nations operates as the preeminent supranational association of the world's nations, each supposedly sovereign and a jealous guardian of its territorial integrity. Yet at the same time, and especially since the momentous cataclysm in the erstwhile communist world, the United Nations has shown considerable sympathy for the principle of self-determination of peoples and has readily accepted the formation of a few dozen newly independent states based on ethnicity in territories that had recently been part of the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Ethiopia.

How far can such a process of redefinition of ethnic nation-states go? It is hard to say, because once some ethnic identities assert themselves it is almost inevitable that other groups will surface with their own claims, and that what at first may seem (at least to the rest of the world) a simple two- or three-way division may explode kaleidoscopically into a far more varied one...